Well, honestly, the the only event that was worse than this one was the summer event with tokens (event resource conversion).
There was very poor judgement applied when starting the event (no one obviously tested the game to find out that b-w color is virtually unplayable), but even poorer judgement was to cancel the event after 5 hours of running time. As a result, many people who were at a non-gameable work did not even get a chance to see the event, so they never had a chance to get any building drop, but even worse, they never got a chance to buy any of the event items, for example the "Black friday" buff, which is not tradeable.